


One for Sorrow, Two for Joy

by mittamoo



Category: Emmerdale
Genre: A fic about lies, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-11
Updated: 2017-10-11
Packaged: 2019-01-15 21:21:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12329118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mittamoo/pseuds/mittamoo
Summary: At first lies are hard and feel clunky and strange like a pair of shoes that don't quite fit, but eventually the lies became him and he can't quite remember what parts of him are the lies and what parts of himself he was trying to protect.





	One for Sorrow, Two for Joy

**Author's Note:**

> so I'm not entirely sure what this is supposed to be but enjoy!

Aaron is a very good liar. Despite what people may believe, he’s a very good liar, a scarily good liar when the situation calls for it. He isn’t sure he understands when people are surprised by this fact- he is after all; a gay abuse survivor, he had to be. It’s practically ingrained into his very being. Sometimes he thinks about how much of himself he destroyed out of necessity. He thinks about the little boy, the one who cried at the beginning of Bambi, because he never wanted to lose his mum, the little boy he broke down into tiny pieces and built himself anew from the carnage. He built himself new, almost every aspect of himself centred on his ability to do three things, divert, distract, avoid. Being a convincing liar had come part and parcel with that. Because telling a teacher worried that he lacked focus that he was sick was much less concerning than telling her he couldn’t focus because he was so crushingly exhausted. He hadn’t slept a full night in almost a month, he’d been spending restless nights sleeping on the bathroom floor, the bathroom was the only room in the house with a door that locked.

Even the aggression was partially cultivated for that purpose. Not the anger, the anger is genuine burning him from the inside out, but the aggression he cultivated to force people away so they wouldn’t look at him or ask questions or try to get close and hurt him. He built up the aggression letting his anger fuel it and made it his first line of defence. Diversion. He built it up around him and it stopped becoming an act and became a part of him, a part of him he isn’t sure how to get rid of. The things that kept him alive then, kept him safe then are ruining him now. He’s scared that he’s nothing without those things, he doesn’t know what kind of person he is because he never had a chance to be a real person instead of a construction of survival tactics protecting a hollow centre. Most of all he’s scared that there really is nothing inside of him, the small part of him that he was trying to protect, the part of him that was still a person has suffocated and faded away.

While he is a good liar when he has to be, Aaron’s skills are not in active lying. His skills are found more in lies of omission. It is far easier to just not say anything at all than to construct an entire fabrication and having to remember that whenever applicable. So he pushes people as far away as he can stand so they can’t see the cracks or ask questions he can’t even give answers to in his own head.

It gets harder to maintain when Paddy comes into his life, Paddy is stubborn and seems determined to care. He craves it almost as much as he fears it. Despite his best efforts, and god did he try, Paddy manages to stumble his way closer and closer to him and he’s never had anything like this before, someone so determined to try. Above all else it seems that Aaron is weak, because he simply can’t bring himself to push the man away once and for all. Then Paddy’s fingers catch on a quickly unravelling thread and what else is there to do but pull. He falls back on tried and tested protection and lets his fists fly but still Paddy- soft, _good_ Paddy refuses to let go. In the end there’s a garage, a hospital, and a court full of people before the first of his secrets is torn bloody from his chest.

In time the blood is wiped away and the gaping wound stitched before other secrets, black and slimy ooze out as well. It gets easier to hide things after that because once one secret is out people assume they know everything and even Paddy stops scrutinizing him so closely. It isn’t the only good thing to come out of the whole mess though, now he feels less like he’s going to burst, with one less thing to push down, repress and hide. He has Jackson now too, another person who cares about him against all odds. Someone who cares about him even though he was born with something broken inside of him.

The first time he has sex- real, consensual sex with a man he cries afterwards, he tries to play it off and they don’t talk about it. Jackson is good at knowing when not to push and crack open his guards lest he cut himself on the splintered edges. Then there’s an argument and a crash, and with the sound of creaking, splintering metal it all comes crashing down. He tries to carry on after and he tries, god he tries so fucking hard to get Jackson to carry on too, but then Jackson is gone. Jackson is gone by his own hand and Aaron was a fool to think that the twisted part of him that ruins people wouldn’t reach Jackson too.

In court they declare him not guilty of murder, he wonders when the rest of him will get the memo and stop feeling as though he is. Aaron thinks that if there were anything good in him at all before, however small, it’s gone now. Once again he builds up a lie to hide behind, he’s getting better at it and for a long time he starts to believe it himself even when he sits with bloodied fingers and the sharp relief of pain he convinces himself that he’s doing okay. He needs this, _he needs this._  It isn’t until his mum bursts through his bedroom door that his newest walls crumple like paper.

He starts to see a counsellor, a man who helps him. The counsellor talks to him about grief and guilt and presents healthier coping mechanisms to deal with what happened to Jackson and helps lessen the guilt of what he’d done. And it was helping, it really was, but then the counsellor moved past Jackson and tried to chip away at other walls, how he felt about his own attempt, the reasons behind it, and the way he’d grown up. Aaron couldn’t let that happen so he has to ask that the sessions between them come to an end.

For a while he exists, nothing more and nothing less. He wakes up, he goes to work, he goes to bed. He copes.  Aaron can’t really ask for more of life that that, he already has far more than he deserves. Then he finds himself standing in a police station telling them he started a fire, more lies but this time it feels different somehow because now he’s protecting someone. Adam, who doesn’t deserve to go down. Adam who is and always has been too good for him. It’s only natural that Aaron, dirty, twisted, broken Aaron should be the one to take his place. The lies drip easily from his lips and he doesn’t regret them at all.

Only, he finds that maybe he does regret them a little bit because of seeing it through, he goes on the run to France with a bloke he’s only just met. He grows to love Ed, he really does but in the end, it had been a rash decision, too soon for Aaron to give Ed what he had wanted from a relationship. They decide to split, it’s a mutual decision and not one made on unpleasant terms but still Aaron moves out and they lose contact with one another.

It’s months of squatting in empty flats, sleeping on mates’ sofas and taking rank cleaning jobs before he’s rushing back to save Adam from himself again. It all goes wrong and the truth comes rushing out, leaving Adam in prison and Aaron on suspended sentence. The truth always seems to come out in the end and it frightens him more than anything else in the world.

 

****

He’s been having an affair with an engaged man, a married man now, and a good woman is dead. He’s been telling lie after lie after lie to the people around him about where he’s going and what he’s been doing all for a man who doesn’t love him. She fell, she’d taken a step back and fallen through rotten wood. It was an accident and Robert looks petrified and Aaron loves him, so he’s here wiping away their footprints, all the evidence of their presence in the farm gone as if they were never there. A woman is dead and it’s all down to Aaron. Lie upon lie upon lie, the cycle begins again.

She didn’t just fall. Katie died because Robert pushed her. He deleted the pictures and then he pushed her to her death. Aaron had covered it up, god, he had covered it up. What did that make him? Katie was dead and it was all his fault. If he hadn’t of texted her, and if he wasn’t so pathetic to get so stupidly attached to a married man none of this wouldn’t have happened. It wasn’t an accident. He’d killed Katie. Aaron was responsible for her death and then he had covered it up as if nothing had ever happened.

Robert says that he loves him back. Their affair begins to fall apart, getting closer and closer to discovery. He ends up in a secluded lodge, bound and gagged with a gun aimed at his head. He’s ready to die, it isn’t enough for what he’s done but at least if he’s dead he can’t hurt anyone else. The gun goes off and he half expects his world to go black dramatically, but it doesn’t because Robert hadn’t shot him. He’d shot Paddy. Paddy who has a little boy depending on him. A little boy that could’ve lost his father because he couldn’t keep it in his pants. He wishes Robert had shot him instead.

Another lie is exposed, this time Aaron is the one to expose it, all on his own. Nobody else. He stand there in that kitchen and he hurls detail after sordid detail at Chrissie like poison. It’s vicious and cruel and nasty but it’s all Aaron has left. He needs Robert to hurt and lose everything and it that moment he cares about nothing other than exposing the ugly truth and ruining Robert’s lovely life in his mansion.

****

He gets out of prison and it seems that in no time at all his worst nightmares are coming true. Gordon sweeps back into their life as if nothing had ever happened, as if Aaron hadn’t grown up terrified of the sound of his footsteps. As if the sound of footsteps in the night didn’t still cause him to break out in a cold sweat. His mother accepts him back into her life almost without question, pushing him to try and get along with his dad and she won’t hear a word otherwise. The feeling build up behind the wall like a reservoir breaking its banks and Aaron fears that the wall will break under the pressure.

As an adult he once again tells more lies. He forces a smile onto his face and tell his mum that he’ll try harder with his dad. He doesn’t say that he thinks he’s suicidal again. He says nothing about the sharp steel he knows is waiting for him in the drawer of his bedside table. He doesn’t say that he’s already used it. Instead he makes a call to Ed and packs the essentials away in a bag.

He sits at the scrapyard and writes a letter to Adam even though his head is pounding and he can barely see straight because he owes him at least something. He glances up out of the portacabin window for a moment when the letters begin to dance before his eyes. He reckon that if life were a show on the telly or a slightly pretentious book filled with imagery, that there’d be a flock of magpies landed in the scrapyard and that he’d count them one by one. _Seven for a secret never to be told._   

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! feedback is always Appreciated!  
> Apparently not as many people knew this rhyme as I thought but there's a rhyme some children sing when they see magpies which goes:  
> One for sorrow   
> Two for joy  
> Three for a girl   
> Four for a boy   
> Five for silver   
> Six for gold   
> Seven for a secret never to be told.


End file.
